Book Review: Sports Cars by Charlotte & Peter Fiell--- What Collector Tastes Say About Society

If you like old cars and you're looking for a distraction from the relentlessly bleak news about the world around us, you could do far worse than spending a weekend sinking into Sports Cars, by Charlotte & Peter Fiell, published in 2023 by Taschen.  The ample color photography is all as well-composed as the cover shot of the '56 Ferrari 290 MM, and there are monochrome photos of the races where many of these cars originally competed.  The book is divided into eras: 1910-1930s, 1950s, 1960s, 1970s-90s, and the 2000s. As the subtitle indicates, the focus is on "ultimate collector cars", and this occasionally leads to featuring a car that attracts huge auction bids today, rather than one that was more innovative technically, or more successful in racing. But because there's all that photography to go with the stories, this aspect of the book will only strike you if you're a fan of a particular car.  Like the Maserati 300S which is not featured, but more successful in racing than big brother 450S, which is.  Or like Italy's pioneering Lancia, which is not featured at all...

We understand that the 50-car, 511-page format imposes limits, but think that some redundancy could be reduced. Keep the classic Mercedes 300SL Gullwing, but drop the roadster, likewise choosing the race-winning Shelby AC Cobra 289 over the 427.  There could be some culling of racing red Ferraris, too.  Then maybe the authors would have room for the Lancia D-24, above, which beat Ferrari in the '53 Carrera Panamericana, the '54 Mille Miglia and the '54 Targa Florio.  The section on 70s cars is kind of thin, as it features only one car actually introduced in '67, so it would benefit from inclusion of Lancia's Stratos HF, which won the World Rally Championship in '74, '75 and '76.  If that's not a 70s landmark, nothing is.  Maybe for a future revised edition...

The text helpfully lists the engine size, configuration and power, transmission type, top speed and number produced for each car, and tells the creation story of each. Engineers and body designers get plenty of credit along with race drivers; even the poster artists get mentioned.  You might be surprised to discover that the 1912 Stutz Bearcat featured a 3-speed transaxle nearly 4 decades before Lancia introduced the first modern production car with front engine and rear transaxle.  You won't be surprised that Maserati gets 3 cars included, but not the offshoot OSCA made by the Maserati brothers, as the OSCA is better-known by racers than trend-conscious collectors...

Other etceterini like the 60s Fiat Abarth below didn't make the grade, perhaps because they are typically small and auction for 6 figures instead of 7 or 8.  Perhaps for similar reasons, pioneering beauties like the Lotus Eleven and Type 14 Elite don't appear.  Again, a suggestion for a future book...

The chapter on 1960s cars makes it clear the authors feel this was a golden age; they include 17 cars.  Six of these are mid-engined, showing the effect of the revolution presaged by the Porsche 550 Spyder in the 50s chapter, realized by Cooper's GP Championships in '59 & '60, and reflected in production cars like the Lamborghini Miura below.

The section on the 1970s-90s surprises by including only one car from each decade.  The '71 Lamborghini Miura SVJ is really a modified version of the P400 Miura which first appeared in 1967.  Representing the 70s instead, you might've expected to see Lambo's LP400 Countach, also bodied by Bertone, as Marcello Gandini's wild wedge occupied so many posters on teenagers' walls and influenced other cars of that decade.  Gandini's earlier design for the Miura is more graceful and fluid, though, and the first of 4 SVJs attracted a huge auction bid because it was built for the Shah of Iran (the money factor). The money factor began to dominate as we moved into the 1990s, just as it became clear that the distribution of wealth in society had shifted upward to the peak of the socioeconomic pyramid...

The authors selected the McLaren F1 to represent the 90s (no complaints there on technical or esthetic terms). The original price range of the F1 was $800,000 to $1 million, making it stunningly expensive as well as stunning.  The 3-passenger, center-steered, mid-engined road rocket signaled the beginning of the transition from supercars to hypercars, cars that were purchased because of their high prices, rather than despite them.  The authors note that the Sultan of Brunei bought 3 of the 6 special LM models; one wonders if he will drive all of them.  F1s have since brought auction prices of up to $20 million; one guesses owning half of the special LMs produced will have some effect on an eventual auction price.  By the 2000s it was apparent that these types of cars had entered the category of vacant Manhattan penthouses owned by oligarchs in distant dictatorships; they are places to park money rather than driving or racing machines.  By the 2000s hypercars proliferated along with the lopsided distribution of wealth; the authors feature 8 cars in that chapter, many of them with contrived, gimmick-ridden forms designed to capture attention in an attention economy, including Ferrari's La Ferrari. Something has gone off track when the builders need to tell you twice that their product is a Ferrari. Superlatives and hyperbole begin to run a bit rampant in this chapter, and a visit by the Adjective and Adverb Police might have been helpful.  Perhaps a future revised edition will note that the 90s also produced the Lotus Elise, a compact, lightweight, reasonably-priced sports car that was fun to drive.  Its chassis design was shared by the later Tesla roadster.  But that is a story for another chapter...

Footnote: 

For more info (along with photos) on the cars we'd have added (without being invited) to the Fiell's awfully good-looking book, you might want to have a look at the following posts from our archives:  Lancia Stratos;  "Lost Cause Lancias: New Stratos and Old Hyena", posted Feb. 15, 2018.  OSCA: "The Etceterini Files Part 30: When a Maserati is Not a Maserati", posted Dec. 29, 2022, and "Almost Famous: OSCA" posted April 20, 2016.  The Lancia D24 is described in photos and text in "1st Impressions of the Monterey Historics: Whatever Lola Wants..." posted August 28, 2018,  The Lotus 19 is described in more detail in "Monterey Car Week 2024:  Historic Racers in the Paddock at Laguna Seca", posted Sept. 15, 2024.

Photo Credits:  

All photos are by the author, except for the 3rd from the top (Lancia Stratos), which is from Wikimedia.